“Fuck, fuck , FUCK !”
“My sentiments exactly,” Graham said, his gaze flickering around the otherwise empty room.
“This is certainly not what I’d hoped for,” Rafe admitted, pushing to his feet, “but I think that—”
“Wait.” Graham held up a hand and his eyes narrowed. “There’s something odd about this. Look around you. What don’t you see?”
The other men frowned and reexamined their surroundings. The apartment appeared small, but comfortable, the decorating casual, the condition scrupulously neat. If it hadn’t been for the body and the spattered blood, Asher might have called it immaculate. There was no clutter, no discarded drinking glasses, no knickknacks collecting dust. It could have been the apartment of a banker just as easily as that of a voodoo priest.
Asher cursed. “You’re right. There’s nothing here. The man would have to keep something in his apartment, wouldn’t he? Especially something that vital.”
Rafe threw up his hands. “All right, I give up. I don’t see it. Metaphorically as well as literally. What are you talking about?”
“There’s no magic here,” Graham pointed out, gesturing to the one, lonely bookcase, its shelves packed quite unoriginally with books and two small but flourishing potted plants. “I don’t see a single ritual tool. Not even a candle. Some of the art looks African, but it doesn’t even look Afro-Caribbean. There’s no personal altar, no charms, no voodoo dolls. Just a lot of empty space.”
“In other words,” Rafe mused, “it looks like the apartment of someone not really all that interested in voodoo.”
“Exactly. It’s barren of magical items. I’m certainly no voodoo priest, but I’ve been in the apartments of a handful of witches in my day, and more than one summoner. Every one of them had an altar for her personal use. Every one of them scattered candles around like they thought electricity was just a passing fad. Every one had at least one piece of art with a magical theme, and every single one of them had bits and pieces of their craft lying here and there among the rest of their belongings. But the best-known voodoo priest in Manhattan, a man who runs his own temple with more than a hundred active members, doesn’t even have a biography of Marie Laveau on his bookshelf?”
Asher’s lips tightened. “And he winds up dead in said apartment with his tongue cut out. Someone wanted to make an example of Charles D’Abo.”
“Probably the same person who wanted us to believe that D’Abo was the man responsible for the break-in at Daphanie’s sister’s place.”
Graham shook his head. “See, that’s the part that doesn’t make sense to me. Why go to the trouble of planting evidence of D’Abo’s guilt, and then kill him? Why dispose of the cover he just established for himself?”
“Maybe D’Abo knew too much and was killed to ensure his silence,” Rafe speculated.
“Hence the missing tongue? I don’t buy it.”
“And your theory?”
“What? I look like Sherlock Holmes to you?”
“There is always the possibility that the murder was unplanned,” Asher said. “Maybe the killer didn’t come here to kill D’Abo, but they had an argument and things got out of control.”
“Out of control accounts for a dead body,” Rafe allowed, “but not the removal of a man’s tongue.”
Asher stepped closer to the body and tilted his head to the side, considering its position and appearance. “Are you confident we can rule out some sort of magical motivation?”
Rafe hesitated, then shook his head. “I’d never claim to be confident about matters of magic. I don’t know enough about any of it. The witches in this city have historically been reluctant to share their secrets with the rest of the Others.”
Graham snorted. “The witches in this city have historically been reluctant to associate with the rest of the Others.”
“I notice that did not prevent you from entering several of their apartments over the years,” the Felix pointed out.
Graham grinned unrepentantly. “Hey, that was strictly PM. Pre Missy.”
Asher tuned out their banter. Not because it offended him for the two men to express a sense of humor in front of a dead man; Asher was a pragmatist who realized that humor made an effective coping mechanism when finding oneself face-to-face with death, one he’d used a time or two himself. But because his instincts whispered that the body had more to tell them.
He paced a slow circle around the corpse, letting his eyes drift over it from several different angles. In death, Charles D’Abo lacked the energy that had made him such an impressive figure in life. The last time they had met, D’Abo had been healthy and arrogant and surrounded by obsequious toadies ready to serve his every whim and agree with his every pronouncement. Somehow the pride that had made him so obnoxious had also served to make him appear strong and vital and powerful.
Now, he just looked ordinary, like a million other light-skinned black men struggling through late middle age. Asher would have put his age at around sixty, perhaps a few years younger. His jowls had begun to sag and his hair to thin. His barrel chest drew attention from the fact that his belly hung over his waistband, and his brightly patterned, African-inspired clothing had hung loosely enough to conceal the fact that his legs were almost spindly and covered with a map of dark spider veins.
He really looked only slightly more like a voodoo priest than Asher did, the Guardian decided.
Another step between the body and the sofa brought Asher even with the dead man’s right shoulder. He paused to examine the way D’Abo’s arm had been bent at the elbow, fingers curled toward the palm and turned down against the patterned rug. The black-and-white stripes framed the hand in stark contrast, their regularity broken only by a tip of white protruding less than half an inch in the vee between thumb and index finger.
Bending at the knees, Asher crouched beside the body and reached out to nudge the hand aside with the backs of two fingers. Beneath where it had lain sat a small piece of white paper folded twice to form a square not more than an inch across.
Graham and Rafe broke off their banter and stared.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” the alpha breathed. “I totally missed that.”
“As did I,” Rafe echoed. “What does it say?”
Asher shrugged, but his pulse raced and the skin between his shoulder blades itched the way it always did before something significant happened. He reached for the paper, his fingers jerking when a shrill beep reverberated in the quiet room.
“Sorry,” Graham said, reaching into his pocket. “That’s me.”
He flipped open his cell phone and frowned at the screen for a second. When he looked up, his expression was inscrutable and his tone firm.
“Grab the paper and let’s go,” he ordered. “That was Missy. Daphanie is awake.”
Eighteen
Zombies, rest assured, are a work of fiction, the stuff of Hollywood legend. At least, the ones you’re thinking of are.
The type of zombie that exists in the real world is not a reanimated, rotting corpse with a taste for human flesh and warm brains; it is the product of a specialized form of necromantic magic practiced by a subset of voodoo priests known as bokor. The bokor creates a zombie by driving a person’s soul from his or her body using a combination of powerful spells and potions and imprisoning it in a secret location. The victim’s body can then be controlled by the bokor and used as a mindless slave.
—A Human Handbook to the Others, Chapter Sixteen
Daphanie woke with an aching head and a complete inability to move. She could breathe, she could hear and see and smell, and she could blink her eyes. Anything more was impossible.
Quite naturally, she panicked.
The first thing she did was scream, long and loud and in a key sharp enough to shatter glass, but the only sound in the room was the muffled tick of the grandfather clock in the hall and the slow, steady sigh of breathing, her own and someone else’s. Every few minutes a quiet rustling would indicate the turn of
a page in a book, so Daphanie knew she wasn’t alone.
She tried to turn her head to see who was with her, but all the determined straining in the world shifted her not a fraction of an inch. She couldn’t even make her eyes move and glance to the side. Her gaze remained fixed on the attractively plastered tray ceiling. Its blankness seemed to taunt her.
Panic welled again, and Daphanie beat it back. It hadn’t done her any good the first time; she didn’t see how it would help now. Panic never got anyone anywhere. She needed to think. What did she know?
From the calm quiet surrounding her, she knew no one else was aware of her situation. She had friends, after all, who would spring immediately into action if they had the faintest idea that something was wrong. Even now, one of them sat patiently at her bedside, passing the time by reading a book and waiting for Daphanie to waken and speak to her.
She inhaled deeply, or at least she tried. The breath came in at the same rate and the same depth as all the others, but by concentrating on it she thought she could smell a faint hint of vanilla. Missy always smelled like vanilla, as if she spent all her free time baking sugar cookies and frosting cupcakes. So Missy was the one reading beside the bed. She at least knew that.
She also knew from the ceiling and from the presence of her friend that she was back at the sprawling town house next to Vircolac. She’d woken up to that ceiling before, recently, when Asher had carried her to the alpha and luna’s home after her attempted sexual assault. Since the last thing she remembered this time was being in her studio with Asher, she had to assume that there had been another … incident, and he’d carried her here again. She really wished that would stop happening.
Daphanie didn’t have to be able to look around the room to know that Asher was not present. She would have felt him if he were. She had developed an acute awareness of him, always knowing when he was nearby, not from his scent or his heat or the feel of his gaze on her, but from the way every nerve in her body seemed to wake and flex and stretch itself in his presence. At the moment, her nerves lay quiet. No Asher.
What else did she know?
Reluctantly, Daphanie began to review the more disturbing information.
She knew that something had happened at the studio. The details eluded her, but she had the impression of her vision blurring, of a disturbingly familiar thick fog creeping over her consciousness. She remembered the feel of her tongs and hammer in her hands and the pleasure of working with hot steel and good company. She remembered the rush of fear when the fog had begun to descend. Fear and confusion that the familiar enemy would strike not in sleep but in the middle of an ordinary day. Then, abruptly, a thick shroud had blanketed her consciousness and she remembered nothing else.
Until she woke up now, frozen and helpless in her borrowed bed.
Once again, she fought to keep the terror from overwhelming her. It would be so easy to sink under the weight of her own fear, but that felt too much like giving in. She refused to do it. After a week of having her own mind and body hijacked by dreams and seizures and the whims of megalomaniacs with a penchant for playing with dolls, she had grown tired of being toyed with. Giving in to the panic would be just another example of the ways in which she no longer controlled her own consciousness. She’d be damned if she’d let that happen.
Of course, lying trapped and immobile did a pretty good impression of damnation. Daphanie couldn’t imagine a more tormenting experience of hell.
Missy sighed softly and turned another page in her book. Daphanie concentrated on the reassuring knowledge of her presence to help her focus. While her friends were with her, she knew she had hope. They wouldn’t let her stay like this forever. Even if she couldn’t open her mouth and tell them what was going on, in a little while, Missy would check on her and realize that something was wrong. All Daphanie had to do was last until then.
She knew Asher would return soon, as well. His absence could only mean that he was out there working to save her. Even if he didn’t know she had woken up paralyzed and frightened, he would be working to handle what he did know—that D’Abo had laid a spell on her, that the spell had caused strange dreams and even stranger losses of consciousness, that the witch doctor needed to be found and forced to lift the spell. And if Asher had to use excessive force, beatings, and physical abuse to make that happen, he would do it.
Daphanie even hoped he would enjoy it. At the moment, she’d love to indulge in a little physical violence of her own. She’d love to do anything that involved turning her head or flexing her little finger. She wanted to move.
Instead, she heard Missy do it. Her friend flipped her book closed with a soft thump and leaned forward in her chair. Daphanie could tell from the way the air shifted and the scent of vanilla momentarily intensified.
“Oh, good, you’re awake,” Missy said, and Daphanie could hear the relief and pleasure in her tone. “How are you feeling? Do you want a glass of water?”
More than she could possibly express, but of course, she couldn’t express it. All she could do was lie there.
“Daphanie?” Missy prodded. “Are you okay?”
Not remotely, she answered. At least, she answered in her own mind.
“Daph?”
The first notes of concern entered the other woman’s tone, and Daphanie felt like cheering.
“Daphanie, what’s wrong? Why won’t you look at me? Are you upset about something?”
She waited.
“Daphanie?” The last was louder, more urgent, and accompanied by Missy pushing out of her chair and bending over Daphanie’s still form so that she stood directly in her friend’s fixed line of sight.
Daphanie blinked in relief. She could see the worry that creased Missy’s brow, and the concern in the blonde’s soft gaze. Missy wasn’t stupid. In another minute, two at the most, she would realize something was wrong. Then Daphanie could start to hope.
“Daph?” The luna tried one last time. When she got no response, she reached for a telephone on the bedside table and punched in a number. Daphanie couldn’t see her, but she could hear it happening. She wanted to laugh with excitement.
When she heard more buttons being punched, Daphanie realized Missy was using a cell phone and tapping out a text message. Frustration tore at Daphanie’s belly. She wanted to hear who the luna had contacted and listen to exactly what she said. Instead, the entire exchange took place in silence and Daphanie was robbed of even that small reassurance.
She heard the snick of the phone flipping shut and the clinking of glass. Water tumbled from one container into another, and a second later, Missy leaned over her again. The woman slipped an arm under Daphanie’s shoulders and raised her slightly off the mattress. She felt the press of a tumbler against her mouth and a trickle of water across her parched lips.
She swallowed reflexively and with gratitude. She wanted to suck the water in like a thirsty camel, but even that small independence was denied her. All she could do was wait while Missy slowly tipped the contents of the glass into her mouth until it was empty. Daphanie longed to ask for more, but of course she couldn’t.
She couldn’t, she couldn’t, she couldn’t.
Couldn’t was beginning to drive her a little bit crazy.
“Don’t worry, honey,” Daphanie heard, the words so quiet they barely qualified as a murmur. “Graham and Rafe and Asher will be back soon. You just rest. They’ll be here in just a few minutes.”
But Daphanie couldn’t tell who Missy was trying to reassure—her unresponsive guest?
Or herself?
* * *
Months seemed to pass before Daphanie heard the crash of the front door banging into the wall behind it and the pounding of footsteps up the stairs. Unless she had seriously miscounted the last time she’d been on those stairs, whoever ran up them at that moment was taking at least two or three at a time.
When the bedroom door flew open and her nerves gave a shout of rejoicing, Daphanie knew it was Asher.
“Daphan
ie?” he demanded, his voice a low rasp. “Are you okay?”
She didn’t answer.
Couldn’t answer.
Goddammit.
She could hear his confusion, though, and pictured him looking at her still form on the bed, then at Missy’s protective stance at her side.
“I thought you said she was awake?”
“She opened her eyes,” Missy said, her tone apologetic and baffled. “I thought she was awake. I’m still not sure she isn’t. She’s just … not answering.”
Daphanie wanted to; she longed to, but all she could do was blink. And not even a meaningful blink, for fuck’s sake. If she could have managed even that, she would have felt better. If she could have rolled her eyes and fluttered her lashes and aimed meaningful stares at them, at herself, at the goddamned water pitcher, maybe she could have communicated something. Instead, she could just lie there like a lump.
Like a dead woman.
She heard Asher brush past Missy and take her limp hand in his.
“Daphanie?” he murmured, and the warmth of his touch felt like heaven on her chilled skin.
A flurry of footsteps marked new visitors. The smell of forest and sun and man identified them as Graham and Rafe. In other circumstances, her new olfactory perception might have given Daphanie a thrill, but at the moment she could have cared less. What she cared about was Asher and his gorgeous face sliding into her field of vision.
She noticed first that he looked tired. Lines of strain and fatigue bracketed his mouth and carved deep furrows between his brows. His expression held concern, frustration, and anger, the emotions swirling and competing behind his silver-gold eyes. But underlying it all was a deep well of tenderness that made Daphanie’s heart leap into her throat and tears sting hotly behind her eyes.
The fact that she couldn’t even cry nearly drove her over the edge. The sheer evil unfairness of being unable to experience the fullness of her own goddamned emotions made her want, for the first time in her life, to commit bloody murder. If Charles D’Abo had stood in front of her in that moment, Daphanie would have plunged a knife into his chest and ripped his heart out with her own bare hands.
Black Magic Woman Page 19